Source: Vines and Wines, Vision Robotics Some of you may remember our report on an orange picking robot developed by California-based company Vision Robotics. The company has now just given a presentation of their latest development, the Intelligent Robotic Vineyard Pruner. The pruner works by reconstructing a 3D image of an entire vine from multiple photographs, applying pruning rules based on the grower's specifications and then using two hydraulic shears to complete the pruning operation. The project has just entered its second phase of development which should lead to a market-ready …

I found out just recently about Vision Robotics, a company in California with a pretty broad range of products (or eventual products), but all of them are based on computer vision and SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) navigation technology. Their agricultural products look pretty interesting; they're looking at developing a robot that can go through an orchard and pick ripe oranges off of trees, as well as one that can prune grape vines. The concept appears to be that one robot will scan the trees in each orchard row …